forth at the call of their country to battle for that
country to the death. And yet a sad spectacle, as all the others have
been, when waste of life and mismanagement of power were taken into the
account, and when the thinned ranks that should return, of the full
ranks that went so proudly away, came to be remembered. Something of
this latter feeling, and the peculiarities of the time, made the waving
of handkerchiefs and the clapping of hands less frequent and cordial
than the fine-looking fellows and their excellent appointments really
deserved.

"The d--l take the politics and policy of Massachusetts!" broke out Tom
Leslie, when the array had half passed. "I do not like her, and never
did. But she _does_ send out troops as the old Trojan horse poured out
heroes; she _does_ know how to equip and take care of them, as _we_ do
not; and they _fight_--oh, Harding, don't they?"

"Not any better than most of our New York troops, I fancy!" replied
Harding, an incarnate New Yorker, to the last observation.

"Not better, perhaps, but more steadily--not so dashingly, but more
inevitably," said Leslie, going into one of his fits of abstract
philosophy, where he must perforce be followed, like a maniac by his
keeper. "Our New York boys go into the fight more as a spree--the New
Englanders more as a duty. Our boys enjoy it--they endure it; and some
one else than myself must decide which is the higher order of courage.
Almost all the New Englanders are comparatively fanatics, while we have
very few indeed, unless it may be fanaticism to worship the old
flag--God bless it! If it could have been possible for England to be
plunged into a general war with some other country, immediately after
the Restoration, something like this same distinction would have been
seen. Sir Gervase Langford would have charged upon the foe, his feathers
flying and his lady's colors woven into a love-knot above his cuirass,
singing a roundelay of decidedly loose tendencies, precisely as he had
once charged beside Prince Rupert on the bloody day of Long Marston; and
Master John Grimston would have snuffled a psalm through his nose and
made a thanksgiving prayer over a cut throat, swinging his long
two-handed sword meanwhile, as he had done when mowing down the
'malignants' at Naseby, under the very eye of Oliver himself. That would
have been an odd mixture for the same army; but we have an odder, when
the neat-whiskered clerk from behind the dry-goods coun